Henry Cipolla

Here is a heartwarming story about a Swedish professor who had his hope for humanity restored when a thief sent him a USB stick containing the contents of his laptop hard drive which had been stolen a week before. The professor had everything on that laptop, saying:

“It is my life. I have documented everything in it that has happened in the last 10 years and beyond.”

I’m happy for the professor, but seriously, BACK UP YOUR DATA. rm -rf * happens, thieves exist, hard drives fail, etc. Losing your data should be a bummer, not a tragedy!

This past week I found myself writing code that had to submit some data to a webservice via an HTTP POST request. Not a particularly difficult task but it was on a platform I didn’t have much experience with and I wasn’t sure if I had formed the packet properly. In order to validate my bits I wrote a small php page which accepts POST requests and dumps them locally. Thanks to Dreamhost I’m now able to share this with everybody:

http://www.posttestserver.com

I’ll be slightly taken aback if anybody actually uses this thing, but when is that actually the point?

UPDATE: I added features!

Not sure why but in all the examples online dealing with DeviceExtendedPropertieson Phone7 the DeviceUniqueId property is always commented out. My suspicion is that that this is because it comes back as a 20 byte array and not a String as the other properties do. Well, if you need it in string form, just convert it to Base64:


private static String getDeviceId()
{
byte[] id = (byte[])Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceUniqueId");
return Convert.ToBase64String(id);
}

MSDN has more information on this and other properties here

Unless you are a pretty massive geek, you probably don’t care about ttyrec players. With the close of the 2010 Dungeon Crawl Tournament I wanted to review some of the games by the better players was not at all surprised to find the lack of a native ttyrec player on OS X.

Luckily, it is really easy to install ipbt (It’s play-back time). Ipbt is an Open Source (MIT License) ttyrec player which has all the features you’d expect (play, pause, speed up, slow down, etc.) and runs quickly.

Ipbt is distributed as source so you get to build it yourself. You’ll need to install the Apple Developer Tools if you haven’t already. It’s available on your OS install DVD and for free from developer.apple.com.

Ipbt’s only external dependency is libncursesw-dev. The easiest way to install this is through Macports. Assuming you have Macports installed and configured you can install libncursesw and the relevant header files:

sudo /opt/local/bin/port install ncursesw

If this works the next step is to download ipbt and update the makefile for ipbt to point to ncursesw. To do this first find libncursesw.a (should be in /opt/local/lib/ but you can find it with: find / -name libncursesw.a) and copy the path. Then open the Makefile and find the lines:
ipbt: $(IPBT)
$(CC) $(LFLAGS) -o ipbt $(IPBT) -lm -lncursesw

and update them to include the new path using the -L option:
ipbt: $(IPBT)
$(CC) $(LFLAGS) -o ipbt $(IPBT) -lm -lncursesw -L/opt/local/lib

now you can run make from inside the source tree and it will properly build ipbt. You can either run it locally or move the binary into an appropriate place such as /usr/local/bin.

Feel free to let me know if you have any problems!

What does the Cash for Clunkers achieve?

By now most people have seen the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) bill (referred to as ‘Cash For Clunker’s). The stated goals are:

• Get gas guzzlers off the road to help sustain the environment
• Stimulate the economy by increasing car sales

Unfortunately, the fine print on the article will cause neither of these things to happen. In fact, I can’t think of any effect this bill will have. Read More

We just finished a two part blog post covering the reasons why the various smartphone platforms make sense to develop for from both a technology and business perspective. We have a chart showing the user base and store size of each platform which I think is pretty cool. Check it out:

http://www.localytics.com/blog/post/smartphone-os-wars-what-platforms-to-develop-for-part-i/

a quick recap of some of the things I personally found interesting or worth noting about all of the various smartphone announced / releases over the last few weeks:

1) TomTom is not the first GPS maker to have a mobile app
When it was announced at WWDC that Tomtom was making an application for the iphone 3G it generated a good bit of buzz. The blogs wrote, the twitters tweeted, and so forth. Turn by turn directions on a mobile device has not only already been done for free by Microsoft but it has also been available commercially from Garmin for at least the last year.

2) Cupcake still doesn’t open up Bluetooth to developers
It is very clear that Apple is attempting to leverage the iPhone’s Bluetooth capabilities to get hardware makers to create iPhone apps to drive all sorts of curious hardware. The best example which comes to mind is medical equipment in hospitals but I would be that plenty of devices will come with a Bluetooth interface and a matching iPhone app over the next year. This is why I think it is so absurd that Android still hasn’t opened up this world to its own developers. Perhaps they are waiting to perfect the API but if they wait long enough it won’t matter anymore!

3) The Palm Pre’s Dev mode is engaged via the Konami Code
Seriously. See this video. This alone has amused many developers and shows that Palm is trying hard to make this device memorable. I find myself unable to talk about the recent releases without mentioning this.

Playing Doom on my G1 got me interested in what the speed run community has done with the game. I did some quick searching and the best video I could find is this completion of Doom 2 in 17 minutes. I don’t have any other details, such as what system they are on but from watching the video it seems like this is tool assisted so I would assume it’s a console. They also appear to be mucking with layers such that they can see the invisible demons which is a bit cheap. However, it’s still a very fun run to watch. I haven’t played this game since roughly 1997 but watching this brought back memories of a few moments.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we have moved our office to Central Square in Cambridge. It’s definitely a colorful area. No matter what time I arrive at the office there are always people standing in front of the Can Tab Lounge waiting to get well before their day of work. Yesterday, after walking somebody who came to meet with us to the door, I spent five minutes listening to somebody explain to the sky that god is a piece of a poo (he used a different word) in Spanish. Amusement aside, there are a lot of really good companies located within walking distance of Central Square and with the huge selection of places to eat I am pretty certain I’ll run out of contacts long before I run out of restaurants. I’m also very pleased at the affordability. All the food places are within my meager startup budget!

However, this post isn’t about Central Square, it’s about Cambridge in general. Andrew, got himself an apartment and decided to get a Cambridge resident parking permit. To qualify for this permit he must provide all the usual paperwork: updated vehicle registration, proof of residency, processing fee, and so on. Well, take a look at the proof of residency requirements: http://www.cambridgema.gov/Traffic/ResidencyProof.cfm they accept a utility bill with the resident’s name on it, which is pretty standard. They also accept two letters, dated within the last 30 days with Andrew’s name on it. This means that to prove to Cambridge that one is a resident one simply goes the post office, buys two stamped envelopes, write their name and address on them, and sends them to one’s self.

So, process for getting a Cambridge sticker:

1. call the RMV and change your addres
2. mail two envelopes to yourself
3. present this along with your $8 and accept your permit

At no point in this process is one required to do anything which actually requires moving to Cambridge. This seems very broken to me.

At BarcampBoston today I realized I needed a URL that points to me that isn’t just my company website. With this as my inspiration I finally sat down and updated my site to have recent information (such as a link to the startup I’ve been talking about for the last year).

If you missed it on the front page I encourage you to take a look at our company, Localytics. Our first product is a mobile application analytics engine which actually works and has a number of users. We’ll see where it goes but it would be wonderful to one day have a suite of mobile developer tools which work together to help mobile developers make successful businesses.

Other than that, I did a good talk today at the Barcamp with Yoni from Active Frequency. I’ll put the slides up in a few days. (I can’t post twice in one day after not posting for over half a year).